The Case for Selling Human Organs

Ronald Bailey | April 18, 2001 National Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness Week is, by order of Congress, celebrated this week. It's been 34 years since Dr. Christian Bernard performed the world's first heart transplant in Cape Town, South Africa, but the modern era of organ transplantation essentially began when the anti-rejection drug cyclosporin was introduced in 1981. In 2000, 22,827 organs were transplanted in the United States. Since 1990, a total of 185,347 organs have been transplanted into patients in the U.S. That's the good news. The bad news is that, according to the nonprofit United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), there are now 75,863 men, women and children on the national organ transplantation waiting list. That's up from 20,481 a decade ago. Cadaveric donors--that is brain-dead donors--increased from 4,011 in 1989 to 5,984 in 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). An average of 3.6 organs for transplant were taken from cadaveric donors. Meanwhile living donors surged from 1,918 in 1989 to 5,532 in 2000. Despite these increases, an average of 15 people still die every day while waiting for an organ that could have saved their lives. "With the success and acceptance of organ transplantation, it has become routine therapy for many diseases," UNOS President Patricia Adams says. "We have the know-how to save tens of thousands of lives. What we don't have are enough donated organs to make it possible." HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson announced plans to address the organ shortage by exploring the idea of creating a national online registry where people can officially record their desire to be organ donors after they die. Thompson has also launched a campaign to get corporations to discuss becoming donors with their employees. Finally, Thompson wants to create a national medal to honor the families of organ donors. All of these are decent, salutary goals. And they will do absolutely nothing to end the shortage. The normal way to handle shortages is to let prices rise to the market-clearing price. With organs, it might work this way: A cadaveric donor's family might be able to sell their dear departed's organs to patients who need them. Better yet, consenting living donors would be able to bargain with transplantees or their insurance companies for the sale of, say, a kidney or a piece of liver (both can be surgically removed without causing much permanent harm to the seller). But there is nothing resembling a market in human organs in the United States. Why? At the very beginning of the organ transplant era some people feared that their doctors might hasten their deaths in order to obtain transplantable organs. Others worried that people living in rich countries might pay poor people living in developing countries for their organs. These fears have given rise to one of the most durable urban legends of all time: the one about the guy who goes to Spring Break in Florida and wakes up 3 days later in a hotel room with a hole in his side through which someone has extracted one of his kidneys. The taboo topic in the organ transplant community is payment for organs. When it is discussed, euphemisms like "rewarded gifting" or "compensated donation" are used.

In 1983, Dr. Barry Jacobs publicly suggested that the U.S. government consider setting up a fund to compensate the families of cadaveric donors. Dr. Jacobs also proposed to set up a business that would buy kidneys from living donors for transplantation in American patients. Spearheaded by U.S. Reps. Henry Waxman and Al Gore, Congress rushed the passage of the National Organ Transplantation Act in 1984 to ban the sale of human organs from either dead or living donors. National Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness Week is an appropriate time to rethink this policy. In the long run, the organ shortage may be solved with biotech miracles like transplantable animal organs genetically tailored to match individual human immune systems, or by repairing damaged organs using human stem cells. But in the short run, monetary incentives will matter. As one transplant physician pointed out to me years ago, everybody else in the transplant business--from doctors to hospitals to pharmaceutical companies--gets paid. And, of course, the recipient gets something far more valuable than money. Given all that, it seemed reasonable to him that the bereaved families of brain-dead donors should be paid something, too. But what about compensating living donors? It should be noted that in the United States we already have robust markets for blood, semen, human eggs, and surrogate wombs. Extending markets to include nonvital solid organs such as kidneys and pieces of liver, which can be obtained with reasonable safety from living donors, is not such a stretch. Keep in mind that of the more the 75,000 people on the waiting list for organs, 48,639 need kidneys and 17,413 need livers. The Journal of the American Medical Association published its "Consensus Statement on the Live Organ Donor" in its December 13, 2000, issue which offers this guidance for determining when living organ donations are appropriate: "The person who gives consent to be a live organ donor should be competent, willing to donate, free from coercion, medically and psychosocially suitable, fully informed of the risks and benefits as a donor, and fully informed of the risks, benefits, and alternative treatment available to the recipient. The benefits to both donor and recipient must outweigh the risks associated with the donation and transplantation of the living donor organ." All of that is quite reasonable; the emphasis on true donor consent gets around the grisly reality in communist China, where organs are harvested from prisoners without consent. For the transplant recipient the hoped for benefits are clear-they are freed from dialysis, their health improves, they avoid dying. But how can doctors and ethicists be certain that the benefits outweigh the risks for the living donor? One good way to make sure that the "benefits to both the donor and the recipient must outweigh the risks" is to offer appropriate monetary compensation to a living donor for a kidney or a piece of liver. When that happens, it will finally be time to celebrate National Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness Week. Source: http://reason.com/archives/2001/04/18/the-case-for-selling-human-org

China promises to phase out harvesting of organs from executed prisoners

Saturday, November 03, 2012 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

(NaturalNews) China has promised to phase out its organ harvesting operations and move to a volunteer organ donation system over the next few years, reports the Associated Press. As you read this, keep in mind that if Natural News had published an article just two days ago with the headline, "China harvesting organs from executed prisoners," we would have been widely branded a bunch of "conspiracy theorists" who were fabricating news. Most people, you see, are utterly clueless about reality. They have no idea what really goes on in our world: Organ harvesting, the U.N. running child sex smuggling rings, the U.S. banking system laundering drug money for the Mexican cartels, and so on. Heck, if I had told you a year ago that a Penn State football coach named Sandusky was molesting children in the university sports locker room, you wouldn't have believed that either. The truth is that people are reluctant to believe things they wish weren't true. So they live in a state of never-ending DENIAL about the world, refusing to acknowledge the horrors of what really go on day after day. China, you see, has been harvesting organs from executed prisoners since the dawn of the organ transplant industry, an industry steeped in criminality, even in the USA. It's quite a lucrative black market, actually. If a wealthy customer needs a new kidney, you just find some guy on the street, frame him for a crime he didn't commit, then have him executed for his organs. All the bureaucrats involved pocket a few thousand dollars each -- and that's big money in China.

(By the way, you probably didn't know this, but the organ transplant industry routinely transplants diseased organs into recipient patients.) In the U.S., people are set up and prosecuted as criminals in order to feed the slave labor private prison system. They don't harvest your organs, but they do harvest your sweat and labor. U.S. prisoners work for a few cents an hour -even cheaper than Chinese laborers! -- making prison labor the new growth industry. Everywhere around the world, tyrannical, corrupt governments predictably and routinely exploit human beings for their own profit. Whether it's harvesting organs, expanding the prison system through continued marijuana criminalization, or just using Child Protective Services to kidnap children and sell them off to international sex traders, it's all accomplished by corrupt, criminal government officials working as a type of mafia. Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/037820_organ_harvesting_prisoners_Big_Gove rnment.html#ixzz2KBv6ELSW Source: http://www.naturalnews.com/037820_organ_harvesting_prisoners_Big_Gove rnment.html#ixzz2KBuiZ8lU

Individual organs capable of independent immune response, study suggests

Wednesday, December 19, 2012 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) Individual organs may possess innate, individual immune systems separate from the body's larger immune system, suggests a study conducted by researchers from The Rockefeller University, Harvard Medical School and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute. To date, models of the immune system have focused on actors such as white blood cells, which are produced by blood marrow and circulate through the body and circulate through the body searching out and destroying infectious agents and other health threats. But the new study found that the brain is capable of mounting a response to destroy certain viruses without involving white blood cells, or any other component of what is typically thought of as the "immune system." The study came out of prior research by scientists at The Rockefeller University into children with a disease called Herpes simplex encephalitis, a potentially fatal brain infection caused by the herpes virus HSV-1. The researchers had previously determined that these children possess a genetic defect leading to faulty function of the immune system agent known as toll-like receptor 3 (TLR3). TLR3 function as both a pathogen detector and an immune trigger. After detecting an infection, the receptor causes surrounding cells to release proteins called interferons, which hamper the pathogen's ability to reproduce. But the researchers found that the mutation in children with Herpes simplex encephalitis did not appear to affect TLR3's effect on white blood cells, which has been the most well-studied. "One interesting thing about these patients is that they didn't have any of the other, more common herpes symptoms," Zhang said. "They didn't have an infection on their skin or their mouths, just in their brains. We therefore hypothesized that the TLR3 response must be specifically responsible for keeping the herpes virus from infecting the brain and not necessary in other parts of the body."

Intrinsic immunity To test their idea, the researchers induced stem cells made from the tissue of patients with Herpes simplex encephalitis to develop into central nervous cells. They then exposed these cells to HSV-1 and to a synthetic RNA mimicking a byproduct of the virus' reproduction. The researchers then measured levels of interferons, concluding that levels were indeed lower than they should be - suggesting a faulty FLR3 response. But when the same virus and synthetic RNA were mixed with the patients' blood cells, interferon levels (and thus, presumably, TLR3 activity) were normal. This implies that the brain cells themselves must be able to produce TLR3 and interferons in order fight off infection, without help from the wider immune system. "This is evidence of an intrinsic immunity, a newly-discovered function of the immune system," Zhang said. "It's likely that other organs also have their own specific tools for fighting infection." The researchers are now planning a study to examine whether brain cells also exhibit signs of intrinsic immunity to types of viruses other than herpes. They are also planning a pilot study to see if Herpes simplex encephalitis can be treated directly using interferons, thereby bypassing the faulty TLR3 gene Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/038393_organs_immune_response_infectious_disease.ht ml#ixzz2KBvNU43r